I don't know who does the marketing emails for #ParkwayPizza, but I want you to know I see you, and I appreciate the whimsy.

Occasionally, people ask me who I think will win in a given election. The best indicator I've found is whichever group is having the most fun usually wins. A related thought occurred to me today. If that same rule applies to programming, I think AI-assisted programming is definitely winning.

Save the date! I'm working on a collaboration between Mad AI and Civic Hacking Madison. On January 20th at 6pm, several participants will demonstrate building a simple website using AI. It should be an ideal way to compare different AI programming approaches. www.meetup.com/madison-ai/e...

AI Coding Tools Demo Night - Joint with MadAI!, Thu, Jan 29, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup

**Join us for a special hands-on “AI Coding Tools Demo Night” on Thursday, January 29th, 2026 at 6:00pm**, hosted at the Madison College Truax campus. Over the course of tw

meetup.com

Congratulations to the Rust community! Rust is now out of its experimental support by the Linux kernel. I think this goes a long ways toward positioning Rust as the low level language of the 21st century. lwn.net/Articles/104...

I’m working on some new material for a class that has a lot of international students and I have a question. People whose primary language isn’t English, does saying “that” help you understand the sentence? “Jack ran so he could catch the bus.” vs “Jack ran so that he could catch the bus.”

Looks like JavaScript is joining Python as a first tier language in the AI space. monkeys.com.co/blog/anthrop...

Anthropic Acquires Bun: Supercharging Claude Code's $1 Billion AI Coding Revolution | Monkeys

Anthropic's strategic acquisition of the blazing-fast JavaScript runtime, Bun,...

monkeys.com.co

This little snippet made debugging view transitions a lot easier

“All you need to do is upgrade” is my favorite way to improve performance. When c++11 came out, the language added move semantics. Simply upgrading the compiler was a ~10% perf increase in most codebases. Being able to make big perf improvements without breaking APIs signals good API design.

rich harris@rich-harris.dev · last yr.

Combine it with forking and you can defy physics: svelte.dev/playground/7... Out-of-order rendering uses static analysis (which we'll optimise further over time) and is fully automatic — all you need to do is upgrade

OK Internet, what are the best Spotify alternatives? I’m currently looking at Apple Music and Tidal. What pays musicians the best? Has the best apps?

AWS outages are the modern snowday

Open Source friends, do you work on or have close ties to an open source project that would like help? Get it here! @uwmadison.bsky.social's Open Source Programming Office will provide paid interns to help you triage issues, verify bugs, and submit pull requests. docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Call for Proposal - OSPO Internship Program

The Open Source Program Office (OSPO) is looking to connect interns with meaningful open-source projects as part of our internship program. The program would match projects with interns. The OSPO faci...

docs.google.com

This isn’t going to end well.

Big news in the @react.dev community this week. I think this is a great thing, and addresses some of the tension and fracturing we’ve seen in the community over the past few years. react.dev/blog/2025/10...

Introducing the React Foundation – React

The library for web and native user interfaces

react.dev

This new translation feature with AirPods Pro is a good example of how Apple can turn an existing technology into a must-have feature by improving the UX

📙 📗 📘 📕 The History of Themeable User Interfaces: bradfrost.com/blog/post/th... It was an incredible experience to write this piece. It blurs together the history of computers, video games, the web, design systems, and my own existence on this planet.

The History of Themeable User Interfaces

A full-ish history of user interfaces that can be themed to meet the opportunities and constraints of the time

bradfrost.com

This makes a lot more sense to me than MCP servers to help an AI interact with third party data. Rather than create a new proxy that sits between an AI and your API, just create a universal way to describe your API to an AI, and let it interact with the API directly. github.com/universal-to...

Universal Tool Calling Protocol

Universal Tool Calling Protocol has 10 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub.

github.com

TIL: you can copy and paste a table from Notion into a markdown file and it will have the correct formatting. Well done! It’s the little things.

Programming instructors, want students to be able to use GitHub Copilot as an agent to ask questions but not let students have Copilot write the code for them? You can do so with this:

Anyone know of a way to allow @github.com Copilot’s chat functionality, but disable code generation? This is for a class assignment. I want students to be able to ask the AI questions as a sort of tutor, but not write the code for them. At least, not in the intro course.

Huge improvement. The first beta was far from the level of design quality I expect from Apple. 9to5mac.com/2025/07/07/l...

Liquid Glass in iOS 26 beta 3 less dramatic as Apple optimizes redesign for usability - 9to5Mac

Sorry or you’re welcome? Apple’s new Liquid Glass visual element is getting any icy design change in some places before...

9to5mac.com

My main thought when reading Project Hail Mary was “I hope they make this into a movie.” When they announced the movie my main thought was “I hope they don’t screw this up.” So far, it doesn’t disappoint. youtu.be/m08TxIsFTRI

Project Hail Mary - Official Trailer

YouTube video by Amazon MGM Studios

youtu.be

I love @apnews.com, but every once and a while, I get a new alert that really doesn’t fit in with the rest

We obtained records showing how an ex-DOGE staffer with no medical experience used AI to identify which VA contracts to kill. “I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says,” he said. Read more: propub.li/4emGV69

God I love the internet outside the US. Suddenly all my feeds are sane again. American social media algorithms are a different world.

@smashingmagazine.com looks like @kagi.com has indexed your production server and your edge node. Might want to make a tweak to your indexing rules.

As an oldschool Digg and Diggnation fan, I’m pretty excited to see this. I am a bit concerned that it will wind up just another manipulated and/or bot-filled site, but I’m hopeful. reboot.digg.com

Woah, Moby released a massive library of open licensed music you can use in video and other creative work. mobygratis.com

mobygratis - Free Moby music to empower your creative projects

Free music resource designed to empower creative projects by students, non-profits, indie filmmakers, musicians and more.

mobygratis.com

The great thing about living through political chaos is the music. open.spotify.com/album/66esRf...

Middle

Jesse Welles · Album · 2025 · 12 songs

open.spotify.com

PSA for K12 teachers: You no longer have an excuse to Comic Sans. microsoft.design/articles/int...

Introducing Kermit: A typeface for kids - Microsoft Design

Using design to empower children by making reading easier, improving comprehension, and helping dyslexics.

microsoft.design

@figma.com, I love you but automatically adding a service that loads when my computer starts, and then doing it again, and again, and again is shady AF. No means no.